Robert E. Mercer

Univ. of Western Ontario

Also published as: Robert Mercer

Other people with similar names: Robert L. Mercer (IBM)


2023

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Extracting Drug-Drug and Protein-Protein Interactions from Text using a Continuous Update of Tree-Transformers
Sudipta Singha Roy | Robert E. Mercer
The 22nd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing and BioNLP Shared Tasks

Understanding biological mechanisms requires determining mutual protein-protein interactions (PPI). Obtaining drug-drug interactions (DDI) from scientific articles provides important information about drugs. Extracting such medical entity interactions from biomedical articles is challenging due to complex sentence structures. To address this issue, our proposed model utilizes tree-transformers to generate the sentence representation first, and then a sentence-to-word update step to fine-tune the word embeddings which are again used by the tree-transformers to generate enriched sentence representations. Using the tree-transformers helps the model preserve syntactical information and provide semantic information. The fine-tuning provided by the continuous update step adds improved semantics to the representation of each sentence. Our model outperforms other prominent models with a significant performance boost on the five standard PPI corpora and a performance boost on the one benchmark DDI corpus that are used in our experiments.

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Generating Extractive and Abstractive Summaries in Parallel from Scientific Articles Incorporating Citing Statements
Sudipta Singha Roy | Robert E. Mercer
Proceedings of the 4th New Frontiers in Summarization Workshop

Summarization of scientific articles often overlooks insights from citing papers, focusing solely on the document’s content. To incorporate citation contexts, we develop a model to summarize a scientific document using the information in the source and citing documents. It concurrently generates abstractive and extractive summaries, each enhancing the other. The extractive summarizer utilizes a blend of heterogeneous graph-based neural networks and graph attention networks, while the abstractive summarizer employs an autoregressive decoder. These modules exchange control signals through the loss function, ensuring the creation of high-quality summaries in both styles.

2022

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A Unified Representation and a Decoupled Deep Learning Architecture for Argumentation Mining of Students’ Persuasive Essays
Muhammad Tawsif Sazid | Robert E. Mercer
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining

We develop a novel unified representation for the argumentation mining task facilitating the extracting from text and the labelling of the non-argumentative units and argumentation components—premises, claims, and major claims—and the argumentative relations—premise to claim or premise in a support or attack relation, and claim to major-claim in a for or against relation—in an end-to-end machine learning pipeline. This tightly integrated representation combines the component and relation identification sub-problems and enables a unitary solution for detecting argumentation structures. This new representation together with a new deep learning architecture composed of a mixed embedding method, a multi-head attention layer, two biLSTM layers, and a final linear layer obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the Persuasive Essays dataset. Also, we have introduced a decoupled solution to identify the entities and relations first, and on top of that, a second model is used to detect distance between the detected related components. An augmentation of the corpus (paragraph version) by including copies of major claims has further increased the performance.

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BioCite: A Deep Learning-based Citation Linkage Framework for Biomedical Research Articles
Sudipta Singha Roy | Robert E. Mercer
Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing

Research papers reflect scientific advances. Citations are widely used in research publications to support the new findings and show their benefits, while also regulating the information flow to make the contents clearer for the audience. A citation in a research article refers to the information’s source, but not the specific text span from that source article. In biomedical research articles, this task is challenging as the same chemical or biological component can be represented in multiple ways in different papers from various domains. This paper suggests a mechanism for linking citing sentences in a publication with cited sentences in referenced sources. The framework presented here pairs the citing sentence with all of the sentences in the reference text, and then tries to retrieve the semantically equivalent pairs. These semantically related sentences from the reference paper are chosen as the cited statements. This effort involves designing a citation linkage framework utilizing sequential and tree-structured siamese deep learning models. This paper also provides a method to create a synthetic corpus for such a task.

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MeSHup: Corpus for Full Text Biomedical Document Indexing
Xindi Wang | Robert E. Mercer | Frank Rudzicz
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) indexing refers to the problem of assigning a given biomedical document with the most relevant labels from an extremely large set of MeSH terms. Currently, the vast number of biomedical articles in the PubMed database are manually annotated by human curators, which is time consuming and costly; therefore, a computational system that can assist the indexing is highly valuable. When developing supervised MeSH indexing systems, the availability of a large-scale annotated text corpus is desirable. A publicly available, large corpus that permits robust evaluation and comparison of various systems is important to the research community. We release a large scale annotated MeSH indexing corpus, MeSHup, which contains 1,342,667 full text articles, together with the associated MeSH labels and metadata, authors and publication venues that are collected from the MEDLINE database. We train an end-to-end model that combines features from documents and their associated labels on our corpus and report the new baseline.

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Building a Synthetic Biomedical Research Article Citation Linkage Corpus
Sudipta Singha Roy | Robert E. Mercer
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Citations are frequently used in publications to support the presented results and to demonstrate the previous discoveries while also assisting the reader in following the chronological progression of information through publications. In scientific publications, a citation refers to the referenced document, but it makes no mention of the exact span of text that is being referred to. Connecting the citation to this span of text is called citation linkage. In this paper, to find these citation linkages in biomedical research publications using deep learning, we provide a synthetic silver standard corpus as well as the method to build this corpus. The motivation for building this corpus is to provide a training set for deep learning models that will locate the text spans in a reference article, given a citing statement, based on semantic similarity. This corpus is composed of sentence pairs, where one sentence in each pair is the citing statement and the other one is a candidate cited statement from the referenced paper. The corpus is annotated using an unsupervised sentence embedding method. The effectiveness of this silver standard corpus for training citation linkage models is validated against a human-annotated gold standard corpus.

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Evaluation Benchmarks for Spanish Sentence Representations
Vladimir Araujo | Andrés Carvallo | Souvik Kundu | José Cañete | Marcelo Mendoza | Robert E. Mercer | Felipe Bravo-Marquez | Marie-Francine Moens | Alvaro Soto
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Due to the success of pre-trained language models, versions of languages other than English have been released in recent years. This fact implies the need for resources to evaluate these models. In the case of Spanish, there are few ways to systematically assess the models’ quality. In this paper, we narrow the gap by building two evaluation benchmarks. Inspired by previous work (Conneau and Kiela, 2018; Chen et al., 2019), we introduce Spanish SentEval and Spanish DiscoEval, aiming to assess the capabilities of stand-alone and discourse-aware sentence representations, respectively. Our benchmarks include considerable pre-existing and newly constructed datasets that address different tasks from various domains. In addition, we evaluate and analyze the most recent pre-trained Spanish language models to exhibit their capabilities and limitations. As an example, we discover that for the case of discourse evaluation tasks, mBERT, a language model trained on multiple languages, usually provides a richer latent representation than models trained only with documents in Spanish. We hope our contribution will motivate a fairer, more comparable, and less cumbersome way to evaluate future Spanish language models.

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KenMeSH: Knowledge-enhanced End-to-end Biomedical Text Labelling
Xindi Wang | Robert Mercer | Frank Rudzicz
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Currently, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) are manually assigned to every biomedical article published and subsequently recorded in the PubMed database to facilitate retrieving relevant information. With the rapid growth of the PubMed database, large-scale biomedical document indexing becomes increasingly important. MeSH indexing is a challenging task for machine learning, as it needs to assign multiple labels to each article from an extremely large hierachically organized collection. To address this challenge, we propose KenMeSH, an end-to-end model that combines new text features and a dynamic knowledge-enhanced mask attention that integrates document features with MeSH label hierarchy and journal correlation features to index MeSH terms. Experimental results show the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a number of measures.

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Method Entity Extraction from Biomedical Texts
Waqar Bin Kalim | Robert E. Mercer
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), extracting method entities from biomedical text has been a challenging task. Scientific research papers commonly consist of complex keywords and domain-specific terminologies, and new terminologies are continuously appearing. In this research, we find method terminologies in biomedical text using both rule-based and machine learning techniques. We first use linguistic features to extract method sentence candidates from a large corpus of biomedical text. Then, we construct a silver standard biomedical corpus composed of these sentences. With a rule-based method that makes use of the Stanza dependency parsing module, we label the method entities in these sentences. Using this silver standard corpus we train two machine learning algorithms to automatically extract method entities from biomedical text. Our results show that it is possible to develop machine learning models that can automatically extract method entities to a reasonable accuracy without the need for a gold standard dataset.

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Building a Biomedical Full-Text Part-of-Speech Corpus Semi-Automatically
Nicholas Elder | Robert E. Mercer | Sudipta Singha Roy
Proceedings of the 16th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVI) within LREC2022

This paper presents a method for semi-automatically building a corpus of full-text English-language biomedical articles annotated with part-of-speech tags. The outcomes are a semi-automatic procedure to create a large silver standard corpus of 5 million sentences drawn from a large corpus of full-text biomedical articles annotated for part-of-speech, and a robust, easy-to-use software tool that assists the investigation of differences in two tagged datasets. The method to build the corpus uses two part-of-speech taggers designed to tag biomedical abstracts followed by a human dispute settlement when the two taggers differ on the tagging of a token. The dispute resolution aspect is facilitated by the software tool which organizes and presents the disputed tags. The corpus and all of the software that has been implemented for this study are made publicly available.

2020

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A Lexicon-Based Approach for Detecting Hedges in Informal Text
Jumayel Islam | Lu Xiao | Robert E. Mercer
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Hedging is a commonly used strategy in conversational management to show the speaker’s lack of commitment to what they communicate, which may signal problems between the speakers. Our project is interested in examining the presence of hedging words and phrases in identifying the tension between an interviewer and interviewee during a survivor interview. While there have been studies on hedging detection in the natural language processing literature, all existing work has focused on structured texts and formal communications. Our project thus investigated a corpus of eight unstructured conversational interviews about the Rwanda Genocide and identified hedging patterns in the interviewees’ responses. Our work produced three manually constructed lists of hedge words, booster words, and hedging phrases. Leveraging these lexicons, we developed a rule-based algorithm that detects sentence-level hedges in informal conversations such as survivor interviews. Our work also produced a dataset of 3000 sentences having the categories Hedge and Non-hedge annotated by three researchers. With experiments on this annotated dataset, we verify the efficacy of our proposed algorithm. Our work contributes to the further development of tools that identify hedges from informal conversations and discussions.

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Multilingual Corpus Creation for Multilingual Semantic Similarity Task
Mahtab Ahmed | Chahna Dixit | Robert E. Mercer | Atif Khan | Muhammad Rifayat Samee | Felipe Urra
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

In natural language processing, the performance of a semantic similarity task relies heavily on the availability of a large corpus. Various monolingual corpora are available (mainly English); but multilingual resources are very limited. In this work, we describe a semi-automated framework to create a multilingual corpus which can be used for the multilingual semantic similarity task. The similar sentence pairs are obtained by crawling bilingual websites, whereas the dissimilar sentence pairs are selected by applying topic modeling and an Open-AI GPT model on the similar sentence pairs. We focus on websites in the government, insurance, and banking domains to collect English-French and English-Spanish sentence pairs; however, this corpus creation approach can be applied to any other industry vertical provided that a bilingual website exists. We also show experimental results for multilingual semantic similarity to verify the quality of the corpus and demonstrate its usage.

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Use of Claim Graphing and Argumentation Schemes in Biomedical Literature: A Manual Approach to Analysis
Eli Moser | Robert E. Mercer
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Argument Mining

Argumentation in an experimental life science paper consists of a main claim being supported with reasoned argumentative steps based on the data garnered from the experiments that were carried out. In this paper we report on an investigation of the large scale argumentation structure found when examining five biochemistry journal publications. One outcome of this investigation of biochemistry articles suggests that argumentation schemes originally designed for genetic research articles may transfer to experimental biomedical literature in general. Our use of these argumentation schemes shows that claims depend not only on experimental data but also on other claims. The tendency for claims to use other claims as their supporting evidence in addition to the experimental data led to two novel models that have provided a better understanding of the large scale argumentation structure of a complete biochemistry paper. First, the claim graph displays the claims within a paper, their interactions, and their evidence. Second, another aspect of this argumentation network is further illustrated by the Model of Informational Hierarchy (MIH) which visualizes at a meta-level the flow of reasoning provided by the authors of the paper and also connects the main claim to the paper’s title. Together, these models, which have been produced by a manual examination of the biochemistry articles, would be likely candidates for a computational method that analyzes the large scale argumentation structure.

2019

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You Only Need Attention to Traverse Trees
Mahtab Ahmed | Muhammad Rifayat Samee | Robert E. Mercer
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In recent NLP research, a topic of interest is universal sentence encoding, sentence representations that can be used in any supervised task. At the word sequence level, fully attention-based models suffer from two problems: a quadratic increase in memory consumption with respect to the sentence length and an inability to capture and use syntactic information. Recursive neural nets can extract very good syntactic information by traversing a tree structure. To this end, we propose Tree Transformer, a model that captures phrase level syntax for constituency trees as well as word-level dependencies for dependency trees by doing recursive traversal only with attention. Evaluation of this model on four tasks gets noteworthy results compared to the standard transformer and LSTM-based models as well as tree-structured LSTMs. Ablation studies to find whether positional information is inherently encoded in the trees and which type of attention is suitable for doing the recursive traversal are provided.

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Multi-Channel Convolutional Neural Network for Twitter Emotion and Sentiment Recognition
Jumayel Islam | Robert E. Mercer | Lu Xiao
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

The advent of micro-blogging sites has paved the way for researchers to collect and analyze huge volumes of data in recent years. Twitter, being one of the leading social networking sites worldwide, provides a great opportunity to its users for expressing their states of mind via short messages which are called tweets. The urgency of identifying emotions and sentiments conveyed through tweets has led to several research works. It provides a great way to understand human psychology and impose a challenge to researchers to analyze their content easily. In this paper, we propose a novel use of a multi-channel convolutional neural architecture which can effectively use different emotion and sentiment indicators such as hashtags, emoticons and emojis that are present in the tweets and improve the performance of emotion and sentiment identification. We also investigate the incorporation of different lexical features in the neural network model and its effect on the emotion and sentiment identification task. We analyze our model on some standard datasets and compare its effectiveness with existing techniques.

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Annotation of Rhetorical Moves in Biochemistry Articles
Mohammed Alliheedi | Robert E. Mercer | Robin Cohen
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Argument Mining

This paper focuses on the real world application of scientific writing and on determining rhetorical moves, an important step in establishing the argument structure of biomedical articles. Using the observation that the structure of scholarly writing in laboratory-based experimental sciences closely follows laboratory procedures, we examine most closely the Methods section of the texts and adopt an approach of identifying rhetorical moves that are procedure-oriented. We also propose a verb-centric frame semantics with an effective set of semantic roles in order to support the analysis. These components are designed to support a computational model that extends a promising proposal of appropriate rhetorical moves for this domain, but one which is merely descriptive. Our work also contributes to the understanding of argument-related annotation schemes. In particular, we conduct a detailed study with human annotators to confirm that our selection of semantic roles is effective in determining the underlying rhetorical structure of existing biomedical articles in an extensive dataset. The annotated dataset that we produce provides the important knowledge needed for our ultimate goal of analyzing biochemistry articles.

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Incorporating Figure Captions and Descriptive Text in MeSH Term Indexing
Xindi Wang | Robert E. Mercer
Proceedings of the 18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task

The goal of text classification is to automatically assign categories to documents. Deep learning automatically learns effective features from data instead of adopting human-designed features. In this paper, we focus specifically on biomedical document classification using a deep learning approach. We present a novel multichannel TextCNN model for MeSH term indexing. Beyond the normal use of the text from the abstract and title for model training, we also consider figure and table captions, as well as paragraphs associated with the figures and tables. We demonstrate that these latter text sources are important feature sources for our method. A new dataset consisting of these text segments curated from 257,590 full text articles together with the articles’ MEDLINE/PubMed MeSH terms is publicly available.

2015

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Identification and Disambiguation of Lexical Cues of Rhetorical Relations across Different Text Genres
Taraneh Khazaei | Lu Xiao | Robert Mercer
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Linking Computational Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics

2014

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An automated method to build a corpus of rhetorically-classified sentences in biomedical texts
Hospice Houngbo | Robert Mercer
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining

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Titles That Announce Argumentative Claims in Biomedical Research Articles
Heather Graves | Roger Graves | Robert Mercer | Mahzereen Akter
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining

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Extracting Higher Order Relations From Biomedical Text
Syeed Ibn Faiz | Robert Mercer
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining

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Extracting Imperatives from Wikipedia Article for Deletion Discussions
Fiona Mao | Robert Mercer | Lu Xiao
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining

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The Use of Text Similarity and Sentiment Analysis to Examine Rationales in the Large-Scale Online Deliberations
Wanting Mao | Lu Xiao | Robert Mercer
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis

2012

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Method Mention Extraction from Scientific Research Papers
Hospice Houngbo | Robert E. Mercer
Proceedings of COLING 2012

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A Machine Learning Approach for Phenotype Name Recognition
Maryam Khordad | Robert E. Mercer | Peter Rogan
Proceedings of COLING 2012

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Book Review: The Structure of Scientific Articles: Applications to Citation Indexing and Summarization by Simone Teufel
Robert E. Mercer
Computational Linguistics, Volume 38, Issue 2 - June 2012

2004

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A Design Methodology for a Biomedical Literature Indexing Tool Using the Rhetoric of Science
Robert E. Mercer | Chrysanne Di Marco
HLT-NAACL 2004 Workshop: Linking Biological Literature, Ontologies and Databases

2001

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Book Reviews: Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Representation: Language for Knowledge and Knowledge for Language
Robert E. Mercer
Computational Linguistics, Volume 27, Number 2, June 2001

1991

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Presuppositions and Default Reasoning: A Study in Lexical Pragmatics
Robert E. Mercer
Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation

1988

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Solving Some Persistent Presupposition Problems
Robert E. Mercer
Coling Budapest 1988 Volume 2: International Conference on Computational Linguistics